A new way to find out what’s eating up your disk space

When your hard drive fills up, the quickest way to find out which files are hogging the space is to use a specialist utility that displays your disk space usage visually. There are a number of excellent free contenders that differ mainly in the way the disk space usage is portrayed:

SequoiaView displays the space usage in a pretty manner using a technique called "Squarified treemaps", while the open source program WinDirStat uses just ordinary rectangular treemaps not squarified. It also offers a regular directory listing as well a summary chart showing usage by file type.

Now treemaps, squarified or otherwise, may be fine but my favorite until now has been SpaceMonger. It’s visually cruder than the other two yet very effective and runs directly from the executable without the need for installation.

But now there’s a new contender suggested by subscriber Marco Borgna called TreePie [1].

Basically, TreePie represents disk usage like a pizza with the size of each slice representing the space taken by each top level folder. Clicking a folder "slice" will then display a similar "pizza" breakdown of the sub-folders and files in that folder. It sounds complicated when I describe it but it’s simple and intuitive in use.

It’s also highly effective. Add to that the fact that it’s also portable, has an alternative Windows explorer view and is free open source software and you have an easy "top product in class" recommendation. My only complaint is its rather slow scan time. Still, this is not the kind of program you will be using everyday so a short delay is quite tolerable

Trademarks: Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. The Windows Secrets series of books is published by Wiley Publishing Inc. The Windows Secrets Newsletter, WindowsSecrets.com, WinFind, Windows Gizmos, Security Baseline, Patch Watch, Perimeter Scan, Wacky Web Week, the Logo Design (W, S or road, and Star), and the slogan Everything Microsoft Forgot to Mention all are trademarks and service marks of iNET Interactive. All other marks are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.